Bulwark Takes - CAUGHT: Vance, Rubio Admit Their Attacks On Speech Mean US NOT A Free Country In Old Video

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell bring the receipts. JD Vance and Marco Rubio used to say weaponizing the IRS against your enemies was authoritarian. Now that Trump’s doing it? Crickets.

Hey everybody, it's Tim Moore from The Bulwark here with my bestie Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, and Sarah's team has found some extremely revealing video of Trump cabinet officials, Trump's vice president, that is relevant to the big news of the day with regards to the administration trying to strip tax-exempt status from Harvard. So before I let Sarah explain it to you, just real quick, the Trump administration has asked the IRS top attorney to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status because of its handling of the protests, the Gaza protests, as well as their diversity practices, or DEI. Sarah, talk to us about what the implications of this are before we get to these videos that everybody's got to stick around for. Yeah, so here's the thing. This is a Barry

Rubin special, but you know, Tim, you like me because you and I have known each other now for a million years. We all used to do kind of like oppo research on the Republican side. And so I remember when these Republicans were going on TV constantly to talk about the Obama administration, who they thought were unfairly targeting Tea Party groups. And this became like a pretty big scandal. They held hearings about it. Ultimately, no, you know, I think James Comey was the head of the FBI at the time.

They all declined to sort of there wasn't enough evidence to actually prosecute anybody. But Republicans were calling for prosecutions. And I remember this. And so my team just it was it was so easy. So many of them went on television, on Fox News and other places to talk about how under no circumstances could the IRS. revoke people's tax exempt status or otherwise target people who were being accused of wrong think or wrong speech. And, you know, when as we were going through the clips and it's everybody like it is Marsha Blackburn, it is John Thune. But there are some people, I mean, Lindsey Graham's all over the place talking about it. But there are some big players today and some particularly interesting clips that come from Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and our shit poster in chief, J.D. Vance. I don't know if you want to run through some of those.

Vice shit poster in chief of J.D. Vance. I've got to start. Well, you know, you're usually supposed to save the best for last, but the J.D JD one is so delicious and I'm so annoyed with him today. We're going to have to start with him. Here is JD Vance a couple of years ago. This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we'd no longer live in a free country. That's what this is all about. And if you think they're not going to eventually use it against your politics, whatever they might be, it's ridiculous. They certainly will. All right. So I just want to put a finer point on this one

for you, Sarah. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free country. So by J.D.'s own standard, we currently no longer live in a free country. He's the vice president of an authoritarian country by the standard that he set. Yes. And can I just say, so like the we don't have to go so deep on what the issue was way back in the Obama years versus now. But I do want to say, like, that was a question of whether or not were these. Was the IRS giving undue scrutiny to groups that were affiliated with the Tea Party? Yeah. This is like a full on revocation.

Like if that was the end of American democracy, what they're doing now. And this is let me tell you what, Harvard is just the beginning. Harvard, because Harvard refused to do it. Like Columbia, they rolled over, lots of people have been rolling over, but there's a lot of rumors about how they're going to start going after 501c3 tax-exempt organizations of all kinds that are perceived to be on the left. And so just so you know, their position, people who are still in Congress and still in positions of power, one of them is actually our Secretary of State. These people believe that that kind of behavior was third world end of democracy stuff. This contrast is such a good point also, right? Because, you know, the government is

unwieldy. You know, I remember the general strokes of this IRS scandal during the Obama era. And it's like, you know, again, that's not good. If you have like a mid-level bureaucrat, you know, in one of these agencies, particularly the IRS, who's like, you know, I'm going to give extra scrutiny. I'm going to really target this group because I think they're noxious or because i looked at their filing and something smells bad like again like this is not good there you know there should be investigative reporting people should look into that like that behavior versus the president of the united states you know dictating to the IRS attorney, you have to remove the tax status of this group because I don't like the way that they're acting. I don't like the way that they're

dealing with speech issues. Or you have to go target and look into the finances of these other groups because I see them as hostile to me. You know, just to put a final point of what you said, like that, like that directive makes this so much worse than what they were talking about as far as the end of democracy, because that like accusation never came up. There was never, no, at no point did everybody say Barack Obama is telling the IRS to do this. There was a lot of like implication or like, you know, there's some gray area but there was never any like evidence of that or or really even like a clear accusation of it yeah they certainly because actually just because

i've spent the days watching these clips i know that they were kind of saying like this this tone is set at the top yeah that's how they were doing it right it was things like that but they didn't have it's just a full-on bleat from the president of the United States saying, like, I'm taking away their tax exempt status because they're like radical left, you know, people. And so they don't deserve it. And we're like, oh, OK, so that's not it. Trump is not even Trump. I sometimes I just really wanted to be a fly on the wall when Trump's lawyers see these things that come through, because if he he was originally trying to keep it in the realm of like, we're going to remove you're not going to get federal funding. Right. You know, whatever. But now it's like, no, no, we're going to yank their tax exempt status. And it's because of this political stuff. And if look, I don't want to bore people with the finer points of C3 tax status law, but I will say if you are a 501 C3 nonprofit, as many universities and sort of organizations are that deal with a lot of policy issues, what you can't do is overt politicking, right? You can't

say elect this person or don't elect this person. Harvard endorses Kamala Harris. You can't do that. That's right. Harvard cannot do that. And so there are real rules around 501c3s. And so I don't know if going back and looking at the way that some of this stuff, the Tea Party Express stuff was very clearly affiliated with sort of a political movement. And so that is one of the ways you can get caught up is like you've got to make sure and lots of people do this and you have lawyers that are there to make sure that the way that you're doing things is stays in the realm of research and education and doesn't go into direct advocacy. OK, so that's the distinction

is the direct advocacy and so harvard he's not accusing them of direct advocacy he's just saying like their feelings represent liberal ideology you're not hiring enough conservatives that's right he's not making a direct accusation of like they're actually doing political stuff because I'm pretty sure, I bet Harvard is quite careful about all of this, as are most groups with this status. Right. We have a couple other clips

I want to show you. We all know that J.D. Vance is a shape-shifting phony and is snide and obnoxious and is one of the least appealing people in all of public life. But there are principled conservatives out there like Ted Cruz. Let's see what Ted Cruz had to say. I can also assure you that were this a Republican president, a Republican attorney general and a Republican IRS that were targeting Democrats.

I at least would speak out just as vigorously against it because if we are going to respect rule of law the apparatus of the federal government cannot and should not be used as a partisan tool to bludgeon your enemies. There it was. Clear as day. If a Republican president did something like this, he would at least speak out just as vigorously against it. Sarah, I know your team's been monitoring. What has Ted Cruz said about this so far today? Well, I know this is going to come as a huge shock to you,

but he has not spoken out. And it's weird because he says in here that he can assure us. I don't know. I don't feel assured in this moment. And it's like, but they're right. You know, if we're going to respect the rule of law, the apparatus of the federal government cannot and should not be used as a partisan tool to bludgeon your enemies, which is interesting then that Ted Cruz has been such a sidekick to a president who ran specifically on a retaliation platform, which is what this is. Yeah, it is interesting. Well, we'll just see. Maybe Raphael Cruz will surprise us tomorrow. Okay, we've got one more that I want to show you. As you mentioned, there are a bunch of them. There's noteworthy John Thune, since he's a Senate Majority Leader leader is out there. But because he's John Thune is kind of milquetoast and tepid comment. But we should watch Marco Rubio looking quite a bit more youthful and with smaller ears weighing in on this a few years ago.

Is this still America is one of the first things I asked myself when I saw what was happening. When you read a headline that a powerful government agency is targeting people because of their political views, that's the kind of headline you read from other countries, not here in America. So you're absolutely right when you state it that way. That is the concern that so many of us have. I want you all to know how deeply committed I continue to be to this issue because to me it's a fundamental issue of our constitutional rights. One of the things that separates America from the rest of the world is that our founders knew from history that no matter who's in charge of government, if that government gets too big and too powerful, it will abuse that power. Well, we're seeing evidence of that here now with the IRS.

We need to remember our constitutional founding principles of limited government because they are the right thing to do for our country. They're a distinguishing feature of this land, and we can never afford to lose that. And I will be tireless in stating that case over and over again to anyone that will listen. These are typically the things you see in the third world, says Marco Rubio. And, you know, I guess, to steal a line from my buddy Pablo Torre, in some ways he's right, because while we've been exporting refugees to El Salvador, it seems like we're importing El Salvador and values and policies to America. So in a lot of ways,

Marco is more right than he thought there. But the Secretary of State now seems essentially happy to be the point, the lead diplomat for a country with third world values now, right? I mean, I almost don't know if this is hypocrisy. He seems to be owning this uh yeah i mean well i do think it's is it hypocrisy not exactly because they're you're

right they embrace they they know what they're doing like you could show this to marco rubio you can show this to jd vance jd vance was saying that that he was already a u.s senator that clip is only a couple years old um marco Rubio is obviously saying this back in, I don't know, 2013 or 14 or something. But still, you'd think that they would feel a certain amount of shame. And in fact, we've always done this in our shop, like back when they were, you know, when we were trying to defend the special counsel, we were playing all this stuff about from Republicans talking about how you had to take the special counsel seriously and, you know, whatever impeachment things around impeachment. So their hypocrisy is pretty. You could used to be able to embarrass them with some of this stuff in a way that I think now it's fun to find them because it's such a stark contrast to what they're doing at the moment but i don't think they feel shame about it like they know marco rubio knows there's a million clips of him speaking in stark contrast to the way he behaves today and he's just decided yolo i'm secretary of state and like i sometimes it looks like his soul is leaving his body when he's around, but

he knows what he's doing. He's going to be like, yeah, well, joke's on you guys. None of this ever mattered to me. Yeah, he's made a choice to embrace the tin pot dictatorship and to embrace the fact that we are going to act in the ways that you only used to see in the third world.

As he said 10 years ago, it's a sad choice, but it is pretty noteworthy. And it's something that as this story, it was worth doing a video on because as the story continues to evolve, as you pointed out, Harvard is not the end of the story. Like this is going to continue to come. It's important to remember and know and have these clips, which is if they're going to do do this they're doing something that the vice president has said you don't do in a free country and that the secretary of state has said you only see in a third world country uh and so when people are like oh you're overstating it when you talk when you use authoritarianism or threats on democracy or what like they're saying it's in their it's in their own words. This is what they're doing. And any final thoughts on this, Sarah? Only that it's such, like, I always have this feeling when I watch the old videos of them.

Yeah. They were right then. Right. Like, they were right. The federal government should not. And this is the, at this time, when I remember this stuff happening, you know, it was hard to figure out exactly what, like, definitely was going on and how, like, widespread. But I certainly think that it is wrong for the government to go after the tax-exempt status of organizations that they think they're not actually guilty of doing politics. They are just guilty of leaning right or left or advocating for a policy

position that the government finds distasteful. But that is living in a free country. And they were right about that then. And they are wrong now. Very, very wrong. All right. That's Sarah Longwell. Subscribe to The Feet. We'll be back soon. Appreciate y'all. Peace.